French startup 73 Strings realised a couple of years ago that one of the by-products of its valuation platform was a trove of structured, standardised and consistently labelled data drawn from private markets.
This, reasoned Chief Executive and Co-Founder Yann Magnan, was financial gold in a part of the financial sector that has traditionally been opaque and from which data has had to be pulled from sources as varied as spreadsheets, emails and even hand-written notebooks.
In that form, the data was artificial intelligence-ready, offering a source of information that could be utilised in multiple use cases beyond its valuation and portfolio company monitoring offering.
“In the AI age, that’s something that has massive value to our clients,” Magnan told Data Management Insight.
Compatible Compatriot
To expand the AI capabilities it delivers, the company has acquired fellow French Fintech company Callisto, integrating its technology to automate complex private market workflows for 73Strings’ 70-strong roster of general partner (GP) clients. The result has been a many-fold acceleration in the volume of portfolio-company data points that GPs can use in their own analyses and applications.“Our clients were collecting data points for the purpose of what they call portfolio monitoring – typically 20 to 30 data points every quarter,” said Magnan. “Now we are moving to what I call portfolio observability, where our clients can start to collect… 100, 200, 300 data points that sit in the documents that they receive from portfolio companies.”
The increase in productivity offered to 73 Strings’ clients comes at a critical point in the evolution of private markets. With growing amounts of institutional capital being allocated to once niche markets in private equity, private credit and other alternative assets, GPs have faced increased pressure to provide greater transparency into their funds and their constituent companies.
This, in turn, has encouraged those portfolio companies to improve their own data processes and, consequently, more are reporting at higher frequencies than they had done traditionally, increasing the data management demands on GPs.
Due Diligence to Questionnaires
The acquisition has seen 73 Strings, which was formed in 2020, integrate Callisto’s AI and automation technology seamlessly into its platform, where clients can harness it in workflows that cover due diligence and data analysis to investment documentation preparation and questionnaire automation.
It utilises proprietary agentic data pipelines, including custom embedding models trained for financial documents, agentic orchestration, a financial AI harness enabling agents to work with complex Excel files, data rooms, DDQs and large proprietary internal databases, the company said.Callisto’s technology will also aid in the future development of 73 Strings’ Valuation, Extraction and Monitoring platforms so that they can harness agentic processing and model context protocols (MCPs) to enable clients to further scale and empower their workflows.
‘Really Smart’
Magnan said the Callisto acquisition sprang from a “meeting of minds” among the leaders of the two companies.
“Their approach was to develop a fully AI-native platform to help private capital funds with some of their processes, specifically front-office type of process – investment, information memorandum and also some more compliance-related stuff like due diligence questionnaires,” he explained.
“I thought that their approach was really, really smart; I was really impressed by what they have been able to build in just a couple of years, as well as the client recognition that they had gained in France.”
Just a couple of months into the integration, Magnan said that the differences that clients are seeing in their capabilities have been “fantastic”. As well as leveraging the platform’s newly acquired tools, they have been able to create code from its AI model to accelerate the rollout of a wider variety of data processes.
The overall trajectory is the enablement of a data layer in GPs’ infrastructure that will help them to move at even greater speed and scale.
“The Callisto technology is basically helping build features on top of that data and valuation infrastructure layer to help our clients move faster,” Magnan said.
Subscribe to our newsletter
